Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy is to some degree a very distinguished writer of a normally cheap genre of fiction: as Brewton claims, McCarthy's goal in All the Pretty Horses was to "tell authentic westerns using the basic formulas of the genre while avoiding the false sentimentality, uncritical nostalgia, and unearned happy endings that often characterize the genre in its popular forms." (133). But what kind of representation of the American est can we expect from a novel that takes its cues from popular culture? McCarthy seems aware of the paradox. Near the opening of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's protagonist John Grady Cole has a youthful reverie while staring at a painted picture of horses rampant:
On the wall opposite above the sideboard was an oilpainting of horses. There were half a dozen of them breaking through a pole corral and their manes were long and blowing and…...
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Works Cited
"All the Pretty Little Horses (Hush-a-bye)." NIEHS Sing-Along Songs. Accessed 1 April 2011. Web
Brewton, Vince. "The Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Early Novels and the Border Trilogy." Southern Literary Journal 37.1 (2004): 121-143. Print.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Blackwood, 1902. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 1 April 2011. Web.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
McCarthy, a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his novel The Road) and highly respected novelist, is said to have gone into a lot of research on the history of the Southwest prior to writing Blood Meridian. And so, while this is fiction, the novel has a basis for its plot. Indeed the Mexican-American ar (during which the U.S. annexed Texas) and the concept of Manifest Destiny are definite themes in the novel. Also, there actually was a "Glanton Gang" of rowdy scalp hunters and marauding killers, led by John Joel Glanton. McCarthy researched their antics and movements and uses that historical record very effectively in his novel.
Meanwhile, the story features a runaway teenage boy called "the kid," who was born in Tennessee during the Leonids meteor shower in 1833. The kid meets up with the novel's protagonist, Judge Holden in Nacogdoches Texas, and Holden, a mysterious, bald yet…...
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Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. (1985). Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness In The West. New York: Random House.
Mitchell, Jason P. (2000). Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Cormac McCarthy's Blood
Meridian, and the (De)Mythologizing of the American West. Critique, 41(3), 290-304.
Peebles, Stacey. (2003). Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
oad:
Travelling the Path to Understanding Child-Parent elationships
In the book, "The oad," by Cormac McCarthy, the world has stopped, society slowly depleting itself as the world's resources do the same. The man and the boy travel in search of the ocean's edge, hearing rumors that it lacks the cannibalism and rape that the rest of the world now unfortunately knows well. In their travels, readers are able to watch the growth of the father-son relationship, viewing both what the man has sacrificed for his son's benefit, as well as the growth the boy has into understanding and appreciating these sacrifices.
Others searched for means of survival, too, such as finding food, drink, and shelter. Many have turned to cannibalism, but the man refuses to teach his boy such animosity, no matter how hungry the two become. Early on the boy lets the readers understand the lifestyle in which they live, initiating…...
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Reference
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Print.
oad
Some books are deceptive in terms of their subject matter. At first glance, for example, such books can appear simple, with a relatively straightforward story. Others are excessively uplifting or bleak, appearing to cater to only one single concept or emotion. Many times, however, the most apparently simple stories can hide deeper themes relating to the what we as human beings truly are. They contain important lessons or hold the capacity to change the lives of their readers. Indeed, as humanity, we are lucky to have the cognitive skills and understanding to enjoy such high-level works. Three prime examples of works that are deceptively simple and/or bleak include The oad by Cormac McCarthy, On the oad by Jack Kerouac, and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Of the three, The oad Is probably the bleakest, while Into the Wild is the most straightforward, but each of the three works offers…...
"(McCarthy, 205) Under the pressure of the modern world, the real things remain hidden from the view of man: "hen you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon something that you may not very well be equal to... hen you've said that it's real and not just in your head, I'm not all that sure what it is you have said."(McCarthy, 56) Thus, through an edgy and even troubling plot, McCarthy manages to portray a few of the failings of modern man and of the modern world itself. As Aaron Gwyn points out, the novel is almost an elegy of the lost world forever, but which can be regained as a new Paradise later: "McCarthy composes a tale of immense terror and beauty, one which poses the most serious of moral questions even as it pushes the bounds of…...
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Works Cited
Gwyn, Aaron. "No Country for Old Men. Book Review." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2005 v25 i3 p 138(2)
McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Strong, Benjamin. "A prophet of Gore." The New Leader 88.4 (July-August 2005): 31(2).
Walter, Kim. "Texas Noir." The New York Times Book Review, July 24, 2005 p 9.
If feminism is about civil rights, human rights, children's rights and the search for peace, then it is clear that a substantial amount of the descriptive narrative in the Road is clearly anti-feminine. This has nothing to do with gender rights, and everything to do with the rights of all humans to live in dignity and be allowed "...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The nights, McCarthy writes on page 129, were "...blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle." The feminist world is not a cold world at all and children are sheltered from suffering; death is not supposed to come to young and middle aged people and mornings are not silent. Mornings are supposed to be filled with the joyful sound of songbirds and the happy shrieks of children, and there is…...
In a similar moment, when he and his friend become separated from Blevins, his friend tries to talk him out of going back for the boy, arguing that it can only lead to trouble. Cole simply can't bring himself to do it (79). It seems that he is driven by a notion of himself as a kind of manly hero, a notion that often gets him into trouble. Luce argues that this is a sign of Cole acting as romantic hero, pointing out that "The novel is suffused with evidence of his immaturity, his romanticism, his grandiosity, his disappointed sense of entitlement" (155).
When he meets with Alfonsa near the end of the novel, she approaches him with a weary worldliness, seeing in him the kind of youthful idealism that she had at one point believed in. She tells him a story of how she had once come to meet…...
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References
Arnold, Edwin. The Mosaic of McCarthy's Fiction. In Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, Eds. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995).
Luce, Dianne. "When You Wake": John Grady Cole's Heroism in All the Pretty Horses. In Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, Eds. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995).
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1992.
Snyder, Phillip. "Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy's The Road," The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 6 (Spring, 2008): 69-86.
roots of Southern literature and how the authors view moral freedom in their works. It has 5 sources.
When the Puritans of Europe left their homeland for the vast and wild continent of America they envisioned social and religious freedom. For them American had been a deserted place and the only enemy they have had been the Natives. However, they did not envision the fact that they would undergo severe battle of the inner self as well as the harsh external environment. As they spend more of their time on the continent they realized that the promise of a free new land has been a dream and that in order to survive they have abandon their old ways to become more focused and adapt to the environment. The pervasive and massiveness of the diversified American culture at the time posed a mixture of excitement as well as danger for them.…...
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References
Blair, John. "Mexico and the Borderlands in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses." Critique 42.3, Spring 2001: 301-07.
Arnold, Edwin T. "Horseman, Ride On." World & I Oct. 1998: 259-67.
Uncle Daniel and Lester Ballard
Proper characterization is one of the greatest skills that a writer possesses because often times poor development of characters or their inapt portrayal can completely destroy even the most perfect of stories. It has been noticed that while most writers pay close attention to evolution of their characters, they do tend to go overboard with negative or positive characterization on some occasions. Despite their good intentions, they get carried away with a desire to create unusual characters that cannot be related to easily. A writer's ability to develop realistic characters tend to add to the overall impact and popularity of their works and similarly a poorly developed or unrealistic character can destroy an otherwise good plot. However in some rare cases, even a seemingly unreal character manages to leave a lasting impact because of the sheer creative genius of the authors. This is exactly what happens…...
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References
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Lang, John. "Lester Ballard: McCarthy's Challenge to the Reader's Compassion," Sacred Violence El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995
McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God, New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart, Harvest Books: 1954
Dystopia
Discussion on Perspectives of Violence Based on Three Readings
Violence and tragedy are a fact of life that the human condition has yet to rid itself off. Misfortune can come from many sources. It can come from within a person, from within a family, or from within a community. It is the way people explain and come to terms with such events that define the life that persists afterwards. In the three stories selected, violence is portrayed in each. However, the source of the violence is attributed to different causes. It is a natural human response to try to make sense of tragic events and people do this in different ways. In this analysis, three stories will be used to compare and contrast how some individuals cope, or fail to cope, with violence or misfortune. Each story provides a different perspective on this issue.
Flannery O'Conner
Flannery O'Conner was a controversial figure in…...
O rother, Where Art Thou?
Homer in Hollywood: The Coen rothers' O rother, Where Art Thou?
Could a Hollywood filmmaker adapt Homer's Odyssey for the screen in the same way that James Joyce did for the Modernist novel? The idea of a high-art film adaptation of the Odyssey is actually at the center of the plot of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt, and the Alberto Moravia novel on which Godard's film is based. In Contempt, Prokosch, a rich American dilettante film producer played by Jack Palance, hires Fritz Lang to film a version of Homer's Odyssey, then hires a screenwriter to write it and promptly ruins his marriage to rigitte ardot. Fritz Lang gamely plays himself -- joining the ranks of fellow "arty" German-born directors who had earlier deigned to act before the camera (like Erich von Stroheim in Wilder's Sunset oulevard, playing a former director not unlike himself, or even Otto…...
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Bibliography
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'N'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Print.
Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Print.
Connors, Catherine. Petronius the Poet: Verse and Literary Tradition in the Satyricon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
Doom, Ryan P. The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence. Santa Barbara, Denver and Oxford: Praeger / ABC-CLIO, 2009. Print.
River of Traps: The Power of ater
In the opening of River of Traps Jacobo Romero admonishes his neighbors (a couple of novice farmers who also happen to be the authors of this book) when they carelessly allow water to trickle to waste. "He [Romero] chided us relentlessly never to 'give holiday to the water,' but to put every drop to work." (DeBuys and Harris 11). This reverence for water is one of the focal points of Alex Harris' photography in River of Traps, a documentary of 80-year-old Romero, an Hispanic farmer who lived and worked in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico.
In fact, this connection to the land is one of the themes that flows through these photographs and is probably a cornerstone of southwestern art. According to essayist Michael Grant, "A connection to nature is the very theme of southwestern art" (156). However, it's the water…...
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Works Cited
Bix, Cynthia. Art of the State of New Mexico. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Publishers, 1998.
Grant, Michael, and Till, Tom. A People and Their Landscape. American Southwest. San Diego, CA: Thunder Bay Press, 1992.
Kittredge, William. Southwestern Homelands. Washington D.C.: National
Flannery OConnor: Annotated BibliographyCiuba, Gary M.Desire, Violence & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine AnnePorter, Flannery O\\\'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. LSU Press, 2007.This book is helpful in understanding the role that violence plays in OConnors fiction. There is a violent confrontation in Everything That Rises and there is a moment of passion in Good Country People that ends with theft. Both stories leave the reader with many questions, and Ciuba helps to explain the framework that one can use to explain OConnors fiction in order to make sense of it. The book explores the themes of desire, violence, and divinity that are related in this southern fiction and that permeate the narratives of these authors. Ciuba uses the paradigm of mimetic violence that was developed by critic Ren Girard, and with that he looks at how individual human nature is shaped by environmental influences and how these authors expose…...
Everything That Rises Meets Good Country PeopleThe characters and situations of Flannery OConnors stories give a unique glimpse into a grotesque world of the Southa world that OConnor used to draw meaning about the moment of grace that touches and changes characters lives forever (Fitzgerald). To do this, she often focused on the relationship between mystery and manners in everyday Southerners lives, but did so in a way that relied on exaggeration and usually some form of violence. This is true of her stories Good Country People and Everything That Rises Must Converge. In these two stories, OConnor visits the moment of grace, where some form of violence takes place and characters are faced with a realization of the consequences of their actions and the extent to which they are alone, i.e., disconnected from the higher power. OConnor does a great deal more, as well, and this paper will show…...
That is why I became Treasurer of the ives Club, out of gratefulness for this extended family. I know many people of my generation struggle to find 'who they are' but the structure of the military offers a potent and compelling answer to that question. To serve means always to be at home amongst people who understand exactly what you are going through: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in" (Frost 118-119).
Being in the military does not mean, contrary to conventional wisdom, that one must obey an unthinking policy of 'my country right or wrong.' The men and women in the military must obey because soldiers cannot afford to question every order and live, however, this does not make them unthinking automatons -- far from it. In fact, soldiers think more about the great questions of life and death,…...
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Works Cited
Frost, R. (2009). The death of the hired man. In G. Perkins, & B. Perkins (Eds.), The
American Tradition in Literature (12 ed., Vol. 2, pp. 888-891). New York City:
McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Iyer, P. (2000). The empire. In The global soul: Jet lag, shopping malls, and the search for home. (pp. 234-265). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Complex Characters: Exploring Contradictions and Paradoxes Complex characters are captivating literary figures whose multifaceted nature offers a nuanced and realistic portrayal of human behavior. By showcasing contradictions and paradoxes, these characters challenge simplistic notions of good and evil, revealing the intricacies of the human psyche. 1. Contradictory Actions and Motivations Complex characters often exhibit behaviors that seem to contradict their stated beliefs or motivations. For example, in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," Elizabeth Bennet expresses a strong aversion to the wealthy and arrogant Mr. Darcy, yet she cannot help but find herself attracted to him. This contradiction forces readers to question whether Elizabeth's....
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